FL teacher on trial: Abuse? “Discipline”?

The trial of teacher Kathleen Garrett, who is charged with physically abusing four of her students at South Seminole Middle School (FL) in 2004, began today, January 23. The four students are autistic. As reported in today’s Orlando Sentinel:

Prosecutors today told jurors that teacher Kathleen Garrett was a woman who repeatedly abused the autistic children in her middle-school classroom.

According to Assistant State Attorney Lora Horan, Garrett spanked a boy because he wet his pants. She bent backwards the thumb of a boy who wasn’t doing what she wanted, and she laid atop a boy, pinning him in his desk, until his lips turned blue and his eyes bugged out.”

The most damaging charge—that Garrett banged one boy’s head on a desk so hard that two of his front teeth were chipped—was dismissed by prosecutors yesterday. The boy is unable to talk. Two teacher aides who worked in Garrett’s classroom are her chief accusers; defense attorney Tom Egan accuses them of being “liars” in another Orlando Sentinel story. This story also emphasizes the severity of the students’ disabilities, noting that some were biters and that one vomited to “[act] out.”

It is terrible to read the descriptions of the alleged physical abuse against the four students. The title of one of the news stories, Jury’s task: Abuse or discipline? is also unsettling to me, as is this sentence: “Jurors must decide whether Garrett is a child abuser and criminal or merely a teacher trying to maintain control in a classroom of profoundly disabled students.” Whatever the truth of what really happened in Garrett’s classroom, I am troubled that spanking and the acts that Garrett is charged with are even being talked about as forms of “discipline” that a teacher uses to “maintain control” among students who are “profoundly disabled.”

In a previous public school placement, my own son Charlie was physically restrained to prevent or to control his head-banging behavior. The result of the use of physical restraint was not only that the head-banging did not stop (it became worse). We have been successful in teaching Charlie “replacement behaviors” to use to communicate his needs and to express his frustration. However, it has taken over a year and a half to teach Charlie to ask for a break when he feels frustration or anxiety overcoming him. My son still sometimes pretends to be restrained, though this is happening less and less. I do not know sufficiently enough about the autism and special education programs at South Seminole Middle School to offer any judgements on them; in our experience, inadequate training and minimal supervision of the teaching staff very much got in the way of helping Charlie sooner.

The article Jury’s task: Abuse or discipline? notes that “still unresolved is whether the students [Garrett]‘s accused of hurting must appear in court.” Circuit Judge Clayton Simmons ruled last week that the students (none of whom is competent to testify) must appear as defense witnesses and has urged attorneys to show the jury the students’ behavior, while keeping them out of the courtroom. One of the students’ attorneys, Steven Maher, has said that “bringing the students to the courtroom would be abusive and might give the trial a circus atmosphere.”

It seems to me that the students have already been through enough.